Food ‘n Drink

Welcome to Food 'n Drink, a personal site about food, drink, cooking and basic gardening / grow your own. Born out of a love of food, I hope this site has something for everyone.

More about Food 'n Drink.

Fast Food Cheaper than Supermarkets?

Posted by Sarah

In the UK fast food profits are apparently up due to people opting for buying takeaways instead of going out to restaurants and spending more than they can afford. I can partly understand the theory but I don’t agree that a pizza from Dominoes is cheaper than going to say Pizza Express, or an Italian restaurant, and buying a pizza from there. Dominoes is probably the most expensive pizza place going.

In the news they’ve now added, however, that fast food is in fact cheaper than buying from the supermarkets, something I complete disagree with! How can paying over £2 for a quarterpounder burger from McDonalds be cheaper than shopping in a supermarket? And just to prove it, here’s a couple of fast food recipes to compete with two of my favourite meals. The difference? The homemade ones will be far more filling!

Quarterpounder with Cheese

You can buy aberdeen angus quarterpounder burgers from most supermarkets. In Marks & Spencers you can usually get a deal of 8 burgers (2 packs) for £5. That’s 62.5p per burger. Or you can get the non aberdeen angus burgers for £4 for 2 packs, so just 50p a burger.

Need

1 quarterpounder burger (Aberdeen Angus from M&S - 62.5p)
1 white roll (20p max)
A cheese slice or some sliced cheddar cheese (10p max)
Half an onion (10p maybe?)
Tomato ketchup (pennies)

Total Cost: £1.05 compared to over £2!

I also like to add lettuce and plenty of it, again, this is not very expensive, 10-20p max.

We usually put our burgers on the George Foreman, and fry our onions. Simply put it all together as you would and hey presto, a quarterpounder with cheese for about £1.00. In McDonalds you can expect to pay over £2 for one, and in Burger King the ‘Angus’ (which is meant to be a quarterpounder but really doesn’t seem to be when you get it) is over £3.

Sausage and Egg Muffin

I adore these and am very impressed that McDonalds uses free range eggs too, however they are still quite expensive (around £1.50-2 for a sausage and egg mcmuffin I think). To replicate this at home:

You Need

White muffin (20p max)
1 free range egg (25p max)
100g Sausagemeat (40p average)
Slice(s) of cheese (10p max)

Total Cost: 95p on average compared to £1.50-2.

Flatten the sausagemeat into a burger shape and either put it under the grill or on a george foreman or sandwich press. Poach the egg. Easiest is to do it in a microwave egg poacher as it stays round then! But you can do it as normal if you need to. Toast the muffin. Then just make the muffin up. Goes well with a good strong cup of tea!

Shopping for Food

We don’t buy ‘basics’. I’m sure some of it tastes just as good as normal brands, and some stuff is normal brands repackaged, however I can’t be bothered to work out what is and what isn’t good! I like decent food, I like meat to be meat and not gristle, bone and fat!

With a bit of trial and error, most fast food meals can be recreated at home, in a cheaper and probably healthier way. Some can seem a little fiddly but once you’ve got the method covered then you’ll find it a quick and easy meal to recreate and enjoy :)

Bake Your Own Bread

Posted by Sarah

My Dad’s been making his own bread for years, and after a bit of thought I finally decided to give it a go myself. We bought a breadmaker (you didn’t think I was going to do it by hand did you?! ;) ) and a couple of packs of bread mixes. Okay, so maybe bread mix packs are cheating, however for 65p I can make 2lb of bread, enough for us for about 4-5 days. It costs around double the price to buy it from the shops. Once I try using flour, yeast and the other ingrediants I’ll be able to save money even more.

The breadmaker we bought is the Morphy Richards 48245, which is £60 on Amazon, however at present it’s £48 from Argos until 16th January 2009. It’s not too big and easy to use. I’ve only used it once so far (I’ll update after a month of usage!), however even my first attempt was pretty good. The bread is crispy on the outside and soft and gorgeous on the inside! I think with my next attempt I’ll use a bit less water than they say, just so that the bread is a little firmer, as it’s hard to slice when it’s so soft!

Next step is to get something to slice bread, however I may have to wait a while for that :) However, if you were thinking about making your own bread then why not? It only takes 3 hours to do everything then maybe an hour to cool. I definitely don’t think this will be one of those kitchen gadgets that gets left to gather dust :D

Recipe: Loaded Potato Skins

Posted by Sarah

I’ve been meaning to try doing my own potato skins for ages but haven’t had the time to do much this year (as you can probably tell with the lack of posting here!). However, yesterday we had friends over for dinner so I decided that it was finally time to give them a go. They actually turned out pretty good too! So here’s the recipe. You can select your own toppings of course, below is just what we used :)

Need:
1-2 medium sized, clean skinned potatoes per person
Sour cream
2 Streaky or Back Bacon rashers per potato (you could also use fried onion, ham, tuna or anything else that takes your fancy!)
Grated Cheddar or some other strong flavour cheese

Method:

  1. Bake the potatoes in an oven using either combination or standard oven cooking. Bake until cooked all the way through, then leave the potatoes to cool.
  2. Cut each potato in half and scoop almost all of the potato, leaving just a lining of potato to hold the skin together.
  3. Mash about half the scooped out potato with a spoonful of sour cream. Then spread the potato and cream mix back into each potato skin.
  4. Grill the bacon and then chop into small pieces. Place the bacon on each of the potato skins.
  5. Sprinkle the potato skins with the grated cheese.
  6. Cook at 180-200o C for 20-25 minutes, or until the cheese has melted and started to brown a little.
  7. Serve with sour cream and chive dip.

These went down a treat :)

Bring Back Derval Kirwan on M&S Ads!

Posted by Sarah

Marks and Spencer have had a very appealing and memorable advertising campaign on the television here in the UK, called the ‘This is not just food’ campaign. It typical involved several types of food, an short guitar song and the voice of an Irish actress, Dervla Kirwan, who talks about the food in a fairly seductive voice. I’m sure you can find some on YouTube! However, the adverts are memorable. They make you salivate over the food and feel extremely hungry once you see them! They’re great.

However, the campaign has been pulled to make way for a new campaign which is currently running with David Jason (UK Comedy Actor) doing the voice over. As much as I love David Jason, the adverts are not good. I’ve seen them several times and it’s not appetising (true, there’s no chocolate cake with fondant oozing out!). You can’t listen and not see the advert, and realise it’s Marks and Spencer’s food until it’s mentioned at the end. The adverts have lost their style and their appeal.

Just bring Dervla and the music back!

Courgettes Galore!

Posted by Sarah

I picked my first courgettes this evening. Out of two plants (one of which looks like its two plants in one but only came from one seed), as I gave the third to my Dad, I’ve picked 3 courgettes and have plenty more to come. They’re loving the wet weather we’re having which is probably helping to swell them quicker too.

I’ve got tri-colour courgette plants and so far had dark and pale green courgettes off them. Over the weekend we were visiting friends who were literally giving away most of their courgettes as they had so many, so we got a few yellow ones off them too. The yellow ones are much better than the dark green - a lot less bitter.

Courgettes are so versatile when it comes to eating them. You can add them to pretty much everything really. I’ll throw them in to risotto, soup, bolognaise, stir frys, I even added them in with beef stroganoff last night and fish pie tonight! You can also eat them raw, either sliced like a cucumber or sliced lengthways into sticks, great with carrot and cucumber sticks as crudites.

I don’t know how long the plants will continue to produce courgettes. At the moment they seem to thrive despite the lack of summer, so I’m hoping they continue to produce for a couple of months at least.